CHARLES TAYLOR has steadfastly denied any involvement with “blood diamonds”, as the gems that have financed many of Africa’s civil wars or bloodiest regimes have become known. The issue is central to claims at his Hague war crimes trial that the former Liberian president used diamonds to finance a 1990s rebellion in Sierra Leone during which tens of thousands were killed, raped or mutilated.
Mr Taylor, the second former head of state to face justice at a UN-backed tribunal, is charged with offences including murder, conscripting child soldiers and terrorising and mutilating civilians. Critical to the prosecution is establishing a direct link with the rebel Revolutionary United Front to show he used their diamonds to buy arms, allegedly shipped to the Sierra Leone junta in October 1997. Supplying a small piece of the jigsaw yesterday, supermodel Naomi Campbell brought the spotlight of mass publicity to the tribunal with testimony on receiving a pouch of rough diamonds from men she believed were Mr Taylor’s aides after a 1997 party hosted by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Others have testified to the delivery of gems to Taylor’s home in Monrovia.
Diamonds have fuelled decades of conflicts in countries such as Angola, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In a move to curb the trade, the UN in 2003 established the “Kimberley Process” (KP), a voluntary certification system now involving 75 countries which claims to control 99 per cent of the global rough-diamond trade by providing audit trails for all stones sold legally on the market.
Human rights groups are sceptical about the effectiveness of the system pointing to weak controls in a number of member states. In Sierra Leone itself KP experts assess the illicit trade to be between 15 and 20 per cent of the market. Ghana and Mali are also major outlets for Cote d’Ivoire blood diamonds.
Most controversial has been the KP decision recently to lift a ban on diamonds from member state Zimbabwe’s notorious mines in Chiadzwa, perhaps the richest diamond find in decades, and whose proceeds are lining the pockets of members of the Mugabe entourage. Government troops are implicated there in a 2008 massacre of between 100 and 200 illegal diggers, and, according to Human Rights Watch, the military is forcing children and women to work at the mines, while torturing and beating local villagers. On Monday, the KP is to send a new mission to Chiadzwa to test compliance. Its credibility as a watchdog organisation is on the line.